Publisher: Nan A. Talese
Against the sumptuous backdrop of Charleston, South Carolina South of Broad gathers a unique set of sinners and saints.
Leopold Bloom King, our narrator is the son of an amiable, loving father, who teaches science at the local high school. His mother, an ex, nun is the high school principal and a respected Joyce scholar. After Leo's older brother commits suicide at the age of 10, the family struggles with the shattering effects of his death, and Leo, lonely and isolated, searches for something to sustain him.
Eventually, he finds his answer when he becomes part of a tightly-knit group of high school seniors, including friends Shiba and Trevor Poe- glamorous twins with an alcoholic mother and a prison escapee father. Hard Scrabble mountain runaways, Niles and Starla Whitehead, socialite, Molly Huger and her boyfriend, Chadworth Rutledge, an ever-widening circle, whose liaisons will ripper ripple across 2 decades from the 1960s, counterculture through the dawn of the aids crisis in 1980.
The ties among them endure for years, surviving marriages, happy and troubled unrequited loves and unspoken longings hard-won successes and devastating breakdowns as well as Charleston's dark legacy of racism and class divisions, but the final test of friendship that brings them To San Francisco is something no one is prepared for.
"South abroad is Pat. Conroy, at his finest. A long-awaited work from a great American writer whose passion for life and language knows no bounds."
